France has made a significant breakthrough in nuclear fusion with the ability to sustain a plasma for a record period, bettering China’s earlier record.
This feat was achieved with the help of the ‘Tokamak’ machine, which is run by France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and is called WEST (Tungsten Environment in Steady-state Tokamak). The machine employs doughnut-shaped tokamak technology in order to trap plasma using magnetic fields, replicating the star’s fusion reaction. Though this is an important milestone toward the control of fusion energy, full-scale energy generation will take decades to develop.
China’s EAST (Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak) had previously set the record, with 1,066 seconds of plasma, a significant upgrade from the 403 seconds in 2023. On February 12, the French WEST machine set the new record by sustaining plasma for 1,337 seconds. EAST and WEST are both part of global collaboration, as well as supporting the ITER fusion reactor project in France.
